[ILUG] Fwd: will the love ever cease? <unix now targeted>

[Justin Mason]

Paul Jakma said:

> > BTW Paul are you serious about older versions of pine running attached
> > shell scripts?? That's *so* broken.
> 
> not quite as bad as that. :)
> but older versions of pine had a mime-parsing bug, which meant it was
> possible to get pine to run arbitrary shell commands by sending it the
> right mime-headers. :(

I remember that one.  but that's not quite in the same boat as the
running-attached-shell-script issue...

  automatically running attached shell script or vbs file = stupid stupid
  mailreader

  bug in MIME parsing = whoops! bad code, but not quite stupid


And that "UNIX virus" mail claimed "It contains (sic) of a so-called shell
script which, when executed [...]" rather than mentioning overflowing
buffers or exploiting a bug...

I agree that theoretically you could set up a UNIX mail virus, but without
a really really badly designed security model overall (viz Outlook and
Windows) it's not going to get very far if it has to rely on various
buffer overflows and bugs in a myriad of different mailreader versions to
get itself run.


> (wouldn't be surprised if similar bugs existed in other unix mail handlers
> that parsed mime).

yep, there was a buffer overflow if I recall correctly, found in nmh a
coupla months ago :(  Of course a fix was released in a few days and all
the vendors have binaries for it on their websites.

--j.